Wake me in 100 years: the English National Ballet proves that the best ideas are often the simplest. The flier promoting their Sleeping Beauty tour comes in the form of a do-not-disturb sign. Click to enlarge.

Trouble in the Balkans needn't be painful

Spreadbetting company Capital Spreads provides some evidence that the age of intelligent and witty copywriting isn’t necessarily over. In the company’s current campaign on the London Underground, they pose a series of questions to readers.

“The Chinese wrap up mineral rights throughout West Africa,” reads one ad. “Do you (a) Get on the blower and order a 21, two 16s and some butterfly prawns. (b) Start buying copper and enjoy the ride.”

Another execution tells us “There’s trouble down in the Balkan regions. Do you (a) Arrange a private screening with your GP, just in case. (b) Seek temporary refuge and buy gold.”

It’s rare these days to see a textbook piece of advertising that ticks all the boxes. Here, the writer has a clear idea of the central insight and proposition – that potential spread betters pride themselves on their ability to read markets in turbulent economic and political times. They then dramatise the proposition through different dilemmas, which use appropriate humour and are likely to engage the target audience. They achieve consistency across the various executions, by following a recognisable pattern, but giving the creative a unique twist each time. This allows them to take over, say, the Waterloo & City Line and actually encourage passengers to read every single display card in their section of the carriage.

Finally, but significantly, they draw on cultural reference points and language that reflect the milieu of the likely customer. Chinese restaurants, double entendre, the use of the old-fashioned word ‘blower’ to describe a phone.

It's all done with type and the ads aren't much to look at. But I still looked at them. Art directors take note.

© Phil Woodford, 2008. All rights reserved.

Phil Woodford lectures in marketing and advertising at Birkbeck College, University of London.

Winging it with the creative

I’m not sure I can make head or tail of the current British Airways advertising campaign. One poster shows a street vendor rustling up some food on hot plates and runs with the headline “You can’t smell a city from a coach”. Quite why this is an argument in favour of plane travel in general – or using BA in particular – is beyond me. You can’t smell a city from a plane either, guys. In fact, it’s probably necessary to alight from any form of transport to gain full olfactory satisfaction.

The proposition is clearly that travelling by coach prevents a passenger from experiencing everything a destination has to offer. You’re whisked from place to place, with no time to explore on foot. Fair enough. But the dramatisation of the idea fails miserably at a logical level. If you wanted to explore London on foot, you’d be hard pressed to do it from Gatwick. Unless you’d packed a few blister packs and had a couple of extra days to spare.

Same idea done better: we see bewildered people staring out of blurred coach windows as they hurry through bustling city streets. Even now, we still encounter a logical problem. If the target audience decides coach travel is unsatisfactory (and they may simply favour it at the moment because it’s cheap), they can still choose to go by car, ferry, train or some other means of transport.

No, it’s back-to-the-drawing-board time, folks. I’m afraid I smell an ad concept that just doesn’t work.

© Phil Woodford, 2008. All rights reserved.

Phil Woodford lectures in copywriting and creative writing at University of the Arts London.

Sometimes it pays to keep your creative ideas under wraps

I recently spent two days with a group of design students at a London university and set them a challenging brief. Could they come up with an advertising campaign that would reverse the fortunes of US Presidential candidate, John McCain? I asked them to set aside any preconceptions, as if they held opinions about the US elections, I judged it likely that they would be favourable to McCain’s Democratic opponent, Barack Obama.

Behind in the polls, the self-styled ‘maverick’ McCain seems unable to reach out to undecided voters and even has trouble retaining the rock-solid Republican base. He’s battling against the unpopularity of George Bush and a financial crisis on a scale unseen since 1929. Can advertising really make a difference in this kind of context?

Much to my delight – my creative delight, that is – the students came up with range of interesting ideas to boost McCain’s flagging campaign in the dying days of the election. “Nothing comes between me and my country” read one of the lines, showing a picture of former fighter pilot snuggling up in bed with an American flag. Another pair of would-be creatives came up with the slogan “I’ve been there” – demonstrating McCain’s heritage not only as a warrior, but also as a family man and Senator.

Two of the young designers likened the Republican candidate to a trusty pair of denim jeans or the reliable “little black dress” – something that was always there and could always be called upon. Another group changed his name to read McCan, emphasising how his experience could be brought to bear on the problems facing the US today. Perhaps my favourite was line which read “The everyman for everyone”. It was accompanied by a TV storyboard that was plausible enough to be presented to staffers at the McCain-Palin war room tomorrow and reinforced the notion of Obama as an aloof intellectual standing against someone who was just a regular guy.

Enough to turn an election around? Maybe not. But I’d bet my bottom dollar we could knock a point or two off Obama’s lead. My own political leanings mean that I’ve tucked the ideas safely away in a locked drawer until after 4th November.

© Phil Woodford, 2008. All rights reserved.

The credit crunch needn't be a creative crunch

Not a lot of blog activity this year, I’m afraid, due to pressure of work. Exactly how long the work will keep flowing though is something that’s quite difficult to predict. We’re clearly entering a significant period of recession and one of the first industries to feel the pinch is always advertising. In fact, advertising spend is usually a very good barometer for the overall health of the economy.

At the UK Conservative Party’s annual conference earlier this month, Shadow Chancellor George Osborne made an interesting observation: "In the private sector when times are tough you take out the overheads. The consultants are sent packing and the advertising budget is cut. Government should do the same. We are going to put caps on Labour's wasteful consultancy and advertising bills."

At one level, of course, Osborne is right. Businesses do cut back on advertising in a recession. But it’s a mistake to view this practice uncritically and assume that their decisions are somehow based on logic or common sense. In a time of intense competition – when many businesses are fighting for their very survival – effective marketing communications can make the difference between life and death. Some would argue that it’s the time to expand the advertising budget rather than contract it.

Creative agencies and media buyers find that fewer clients are spending. And those who are tend to be spending less. Although this can be disconcerting – perhaps the money isn’t there for that high-profile TV or poster campaign – every creative cloud has a silver lining. We’re all forced to think more laterally about communication strategies. For people such as me who work on behalf of a number of smaller, niche design, advertising and direct marketing agencies, it’s no great shock, as I’m frequently told that budget is non-existent anyway. And that’s in the good times.

The good news for marketing communications professionals is that the landscape of the late noughties recession will be completely different the one we encountered in the early nineties. Seventeen or eighteen years ago, email hadn’t yet become a ubiquitous feature of business communication and the web was something only familiar to computer geeks and nuclear scientists in secure bunkers. These technologies mean that an advertising message can now potentially be sent instantaneously and at virtually no cost. So cutting back on advertising spend needn’t necessarily mean cutting back on advertising.

My prediction (hardly a revelation) is that for the next 18 months we’ll see a further downturn in traditional press and TV advertising, which spells bad news for mainstream media outlets, media buying agencies and publishers. But we may well see an upsurge of interest in the already booming media of email, online forums and social networks. TV and press advertising tends to be based on a tried-and-tested formula, whereas credibility and effectiveness in the newer media demand more inventive and ingenious solutions. Perhaps there will be work for the creatives who can supply them?

© Phil Woodford, 2008. All rights reserved.

Phil Woodford lectures in advertising and marketing in the Faculty of Continuing Education at Birkbeck College, University of London.

Why social advertising may not be good for your social life

One of my best friends at the age of about ten was a guy called Tom Hodgkinson. We lost touch sometime in our teens, but I kept track of his career from afar. Not only did Hodgkinson follow in his parents’ footsteps and become a top-notch journalist, but he also launched a magazine called The Idler, which celebrates laziness in all its forms. Its founder and editor took the downsizing philosophy to heart and headed out to the sticks, where he now raises a family in some rustic idyll, surrounded by chickens and foxes and other things that country folk tend to enjoy. Hodgkinson also eschews modern technology such as email. Or at least that’s what he claims in articles for The Guardian, which I’m guessing he must deliver by hand on occasional forays into town.

So, the connection between these whimsical reflections and a blog on advertising creativity? Well, a couple of days ago, Hodgkinson wrote a feature¹ on the subject of Facebook – the ubiquitous social networking site. I read the piece as I travelled home from a workshop I’d been running for the Chartered Institute of Marketing and some of his themes had a particular resonance. He was strongly critical, for instance, of Facebook’s “social advertising” strategy that was trumpeted by youthful networking entrepreneur Mark Zuckerberg at a meeting in New York City last November.

In a nutshell, social advertising is a way of getting people to recommend products and services to their friends in the networking space. Johnny buys a camcorder from me at Woodford Enterprises. He then ticks a box that sends his ‘recommendation’ to his circle of friends, along with a helpful bit of promotional puff from the Woodford marketing machine. Initially, the thinking was that Johnny’s friends would have no say over whether they received his product endorsement or not. There’s been such a hullabaloo, however, that this platform (known as Beacon) has been the subject of quite a bit of backtracking and revision.

In Hodgkinson’s view, Facebook’s social advertising represents the “commodification of human relationships” and “the extraction of capitalistic value from friendships”. I fear that this may not be the first time in history that human relationships have commodified, but let’s set that to one side for a moment. There’s no question that people are concerned about the latest developments. The delegates at my workshop – all marketing practitioners and managers – were pretty universal in their condemnation of the social advertising concept too. This might surprise Hodgkinson, who clearly has a pretty dim view of our profession. Although marketers and advertising professionals recognise that personal recommendation can be very powerful, we understand that there’s a big difference between the spontaneous endorsement of a brand and a phoney endorsement that’s been generated by computer and sent to people who aren’t interested in hearing it.

The whole discussion ties in with a broader debate in the advertising and marketing community about the extent to which we intrude on the consumer’s personal space. All-singing, all-dancing banner ads that jump around web pages are now technologically possible, but I’ve yet to meet anyone who really wants to encounter them. I’ve seen students in focus groups react very badly to the idea of marketing via text message, which they see as an unwarranted invasion of their private world. At the same time, however, we’re in a quandary, because we know that many of our target audiences live their lives on their PCs and mobiles and we need to reach them somehow or other. Tom Himpe, a strategic planner at the Belgian communications agency Mortierbrigade, argues convincingly that brands either have to travel to where their audience congregates or, alternatively, entice consumers into their own world through so-called ‘experiential’ marketing². The old days where we used to meet in the middle – perhaps during a TV commercial break viewed by the majority of the adult population – are fast disappearing.

All these issues are brought into sharp focus by social networking sites, which potentially provide an opportunity for marketers and brands to get closer to their consumer audiences than ever before. There’s no doubt that corporate interests will play a big part in the development of these social networks, but the precise way in which they interact with the users is still up for grabs. If the global corporations push their luck, they find that they get a bloody nose.

At the moment, we’re in the early stages of the social networking phenomenon and I’m going to continue poking folk and writing on people’s walls and seeing how the whole thing develops over time. This is anathema to Hodgkinson who worries about the politics of the network’s founders and sees the project as one great big social experiment by neo-conservative libertarians. If it is indeed an experiment, then I think it’s been a rather successful one. And I can say that without too much fear of offending my old school chum, as he tells us he prefers to read a book than surf the net.

© Phil Woodford, 2008. All rights reserved.

Phil Woodford is a member of the Chartered Institute of Marketing’s Faculty of Course Directors and lectures in marketing and advertising at Birkbeck College, University of London. His workshop, The Changing Face of Marketing Communication, runs in Dublin on 28th March 2008 and in London on 9th May 2008.

¹With friends like these… by Tom Hodgkinson, The Guardian, 14th Jan 08
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/jan/14/facebook

² Himpe T, Advertising is dead! Long live advertising!, 2006, Thames & Hudson

Creative with real bite

Love the posters announcing the new season of ITV1's wacky, time-travelling dinosaur drama Primeval. We simply see a picture of a nasty looking critter with big teeth and a three-word headline that says it all: "Back for seconds."

The challenge of selling death and serious injury

Having spent a good chunk of my career in the niche area of recruitment marketing and employee communication - and still often working for agencies in this market place - I read with interest the recent press commentary regarding David Gee's report on British army recruitment for the Joseph Rowntree Trust.

Gee accuses the army of underplaying the risks involved in a military career. Their print brochures and DVDs are too sanitised, he claims, and tend to avoid nasty words such as 'kill'. I'll be honest enough to admit that I haven't seen the report itself yet - only the press coverage. Nevertheless, the central challenge - that the Ministry of Defence is sanctioning marketing material that presents a false image of army life - deserves to be taken seriously.

I'm always astonished when relatives of soldiers appear on the television complaining that their son, daughter, husband or wife has been caught up in a war. Did they really think that military service was all about trumpet playing, rugby fixtures and the occasional ride in a helicopter? Could it be that the career has been misrepresented to the recruit and their immediate family? In some ways, perhaps it has. But as a practising creative, I know that the options are pretty limited.

Let's consider for a moment a recruitment advertising campaign for a more mundane occupation. Accountancy, perhaps. Or IT. Many people probably die of boredom in these professions, but you'd be a fool to mention it if you were preparing a press ad or glossy brochure to promote the benefits of a career. The job of the advertising creative is to accentuate the positive and downplay or eliminate the negative. This isn't a lie. It's presenting a particular version of the truth. When a potential purchaser visits your house, do you mention the crack in the ceiling? Or simply point out the rather splendid conservatory you recently erected?

It would be perfectly reasonable to counter that military service is a unique occupation and one that comes with exceptional risk. But I remember writing recruitment ads for the London Fire Brigade ten years ago that never mentioned the dangers of fire. Indeed, there's a case for saying that the more inherently dangerous the job, the more the creative work has to compensate and offer a clear and positive benefit to the prospective recruit.

At the same time, there's a bloody-minded and argumentative side of me that wants to turn everything I've just written on its head. Perhaps we should be mentioning the dangers. Not out of any misplaced moral imperative, but because it might actually prove attractive to the target audience. Don't certain young people - and young men in particular - gravitate towards the military precisely because they hope to see action?

Whatever the rights and wrongs, I suspect we'll wait a long time to see a significant change in strategy, as creatives have a natural reticence when it comes to 'telling it like it is'. Towards the end of last year, I ran a couple of workshops for graphic design students at a university in London and set them an advertising brief to recruit women to the Royal Navy. Many of the creative responses were very good indeed and some of the students came up with compelling messages about escaping from the boredom of office life, learning a trade or even wearing a fancy uniform. Not one of the groups presented concepts though that made any mention of torpedoes, submarine attack or capture by the enemy. And this was despite the high-profile case in 2007 of a number of British sailors - including a woman - being arrested and paraded by the Iranian authorities. It would be interesting to know the type of marketing campaign these captives would devise. And whether they'd encourage anyone to follow in their footsteps at all.

© Phil Woodford, 2008. All rights reserved.

Phil Woodford is a visiting lecturer in marketing and advertising at Birkbeck College, University of London.

When it all goes badly wrong

Some campaigns will always be stronger than others, but I think we still ought to highlight the true pups. Two concepts currently running on the London Underground have particularly caught my eye.

The first is for a product that fights fungal toe infections, called Curanail. In a wordplay car crash, the copywriter has decided that leaving your malady untreated would be "criminail". This gag is repeated three times in a short poster and laboured to the point of embarrassment in this God-awful TV spot: http://www.curanail.co.uk/tv-advert.html Although the agency creatives and account handlers have behaved in a criminail fashion, it's the client who surely deserves to be doing a stretch in the Scrubs.

I'd carve out another wooden spoon for Savanna Dry. The South African cider is running with some of the most convoluted ad concepts it's been my misfortune to see in a long time. Take this piece of copy, for example, which appears alongside a black-and-white photo of a tube escalator:

"Show your SUPPORT for people who don't know their RIGHT from LEFT. Put LEMON in your CIDER. Support a life less sweet. Savanna. It's dry. But you can drink it."

Enough taglines already for starters. But what exactly are they getting at? Answers on a postcard to Babco (UK) Ltd of Gravesend, who import the drink and obviously employ creatives who are struggling to recognise RIGHT from LEFT themselves.

A lovely piece of creative for The History Channel, executed here in a platform poster on the London Underground. It's promoting a new show called "Just Another Day", in which presenter Adam Hart-Davis investigates the history of everyday objects. The copy - which parodies a long-running Gillette campaign - is as sharp as a razor. And the art direction is a joy too.

Smashing read: Sam Delaney captures the spirit of London's adworld in the 60s, 70s and 80s.

Back to the 70s for Life on Mars

If you’d arrived from another planet and were hovering above London’s Soho sometime during the mid 1970s, you might have been surprised to see a group of young, drunken and immensely wealthy humans having the time of their lives. These Bacchanalian admen had forged a revolution in their industry and had broken the monopoly of the suits and straight men who’d previously guarded client relationships on the golf course. As they experimented with their creative craft (and a number of illegal substances), they found themselves inventing ads about Martians in spacecraft. The Martians, however, weren’t interested in the admen. They were more concerned about potatoes.

Confused? Well, it’s time to take a look at Sam Delaney’s highly entertaining book Get Smashed, which documents the antics of the adworld from the buttoned-down days of the early 1960s, through to the hedonism of the 70s and the gluttony of the 80s, when the Saatchi brothers actually believed they were about to purchase the Midland Bank.

There were two truly influential agencies in the transitional period of the 1960s. The first was Doyle Dane Bernbach in New York City, which is perhaps best remembered for selling the Nazis’ favourite car – the Volkswagen – to an American nation that had been happily shooting Nazis a couple of decades previous. The other agency was London’s Collett Dickinson Pearce. Both traded in single-minded ideas, strong art direction and an unshakeable belief in the creative product. CDP were so certain of their proposals that they only ever took one concept to a client, who could choose to take it or leave it. Few agencies today would be so bold.

I was talking recently to Glenn Tutssel, Executive Creative Director of branding agency Enterprise IG, who’s been kind enough to host some of my students on a few occasions now. In his view, it’s only big ideas that are truly memorable. If something’s big enough and strong enough, it’s the kind of thing that you can sum up to a friend in a sentence the next day. An example he gives is the famous poster from Jeremy Sinclair at Cramer Saatchi who’d been briefed back in the 1970s to promote sex education on behalf of the government. His picture of a man with a bulging stomach was accompanied by the line “Would you be more careful if it was you who got pregnant?” Tutssel rightly makes the point that this idea stands the test of time. Take away the 70s haircut and cardigan and the basic premise is still incredibly strong. And when you mention the advertisement to a friend, it’s simple. It’s the poster of “the pregnant bloke..”

Another strong theme of Delaney’s book is the way in which advertising was a training ground for luminaries of the movie industry such as Alan Parker and Ridley Scott. This was an era in which advertising ceased to be a science and took on a new artistic and cultural significance. People were exploring and experimenting. Perhaps that’s why the story is packed full of outrageous anecdotes of transvestite chauffeurs, wanton acts of violence and Serbo-Croat account handlers who’d only ever address fellow agency staff in Ancient Greek. I’m sure it all happened, just the way they said it did. Unfortunately, I arrived a generation too late.

© Phil Woodford, 2007. All rights reserved.

Phil Woodford lectures in copywriting and creative writing at University of the Arts London.

Get smashed: the story of the men who made the adverts that changed our lives by Sam Delaney is published by Hodder & Stoughton: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Get-Smashed-Story-Adverts-Changed/dp/0340922508/ref=sr_1_1/026-0379973-1636424?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1188515810&sr=1-1

Word up

Who’s the daddy? The copywriter or the art director? It’s a battle familiar to anyone who’s worked in an agency environment. Designers are notoriously frustrated by the inability of their writing partners to contain their purple prose and horrified when 50 words of lorem ipsum in a dummy press ad become 150 a week later. The scribes, on the other hand, want as much freedom to express themselves as their artistic colleagues. After all, how difficult can it be to change a layout?

In the early days of advertising, the copywriter was definitely 1-0 up. That’s because the whole idea of art direction was actually only borrowed from the movie industry at a later stage. Yes, design was recognised to be important, but it wasn’t institutionalised within agencies. In a world where traditional press dominated, it was something that was often left to staff members on newspapers and magazines, who tended to have very conservative ideas. By the 1920s and 1930s, there was more understanding of issues such as the importance of typography in conveying messages to an audience. And with the later explosion of colour photography in print and the dawn of the TV era, the balance started to shift in the direction of the artists.

The old adage that a picture speaks a thousand words can certainly be true. I remember an ad for Frazzles crisps that I saw a year or so ago which contained no copy apart from the brand name. (Frazzles, for the benefit of readers outside the UK, look and taste like little rashers of bacon.) The ad showed a cartoon pig who was mistakenly sticking a knife in an electric toaster. It’s an extreme example, but there’s undoubtedly a vogue in this era of texting, email and truncated conversation for advertising copy to be reduced to an absolute minimum. The belief is that no one will tolerate lengthy, explanatory copy of the type that was common in the 1970s and 1980s.

There’s a lovely ad for Royal Ascot on the escalator panels of the London Underground right now. The upmarket racing event is known for its sartorial glamour and elegance, particularly in respect of the costumes and hats worn by the female visitors. In the foreground of the ad, we see a lady dressed up to the nines, with the brim of her hat shading her ample cleavage. In the background, a horse appears to have been distracted by the alluring guest and is glancing towards her. The line simply reads “Heads will turn”.

Hats off to the art director, because this is an ad in which design is king. It looks classy, witty and conveys an idea beautifully. But the three words - “Heads will turn” - are still essential. And this is a point that I labour in my copywriting and advertising classes. The very best ads are still the ones where words and pictures combine to create something that is more than the sum of their parts. An example I often show is an ad for a domestic violence charity in the US that was created by award-winning writer Luke Sullivan. It shows pictures of flowers on a coffin and runs with a headline that says: He beat her 150 times. She only got flowers once. There is a shock value because of the confusion between flowers as a symbol of romance and flowers as a token of affection after death. But it’s a confusion that is only created by the combination of the photograph and the writing. Words alone don’t cut it, because without the image of the coffin, we don’t have the association with a funeral. But the picture of the coffin on its own is meaningless in this context and doesn’t necessarily have a relation to domestic violence.

My conclusion is that copywriters and art directors have to learn to live together and will be much happier if they do. If they could manage a smile for the cameras in Northern Ireland after centuries of conflict, I think we should be prepared to bury our own hatchet. As long as it’s understood there will always be a need for some words.

© Phil Woodford, 2007. All rights reserved.

Phil Woodford is a former advertising creative director who lectures in marketing and advertising at Birkbeck College, University of London. He is a member of the Chartered Institute of Marketing’s Faculty of course directors.

If your brand were a person, what would the upshot be?

Later this week, I’ll be hosting a workshop for the Chartered Institute of Marketing in London on the ways in which marketing communication is changing. It’s a chance to give professionals in the field an overview of new media and techniques. Everything, in fact, from blogging and podcasting through to guerrilla advertising and alternate reality gaming. Should be fun.

While preparing material for the course, I chanced upon a brand called Upshot Energy – an American drink that packs a lot of power in a small bottle. Upshot have been doing quite a number of interesting things recently, including miniature rock concerts where they crammed a band into a tiny lorry and took them out on the road. Lots of energy, you see, in a small space. Passers-by could watch the musicians perform through glass panels.

Even more interesting is Upshot’s appropriation of myspace.com. Of course, they aren’t the first business to have seen the potential of so-called social media, but their page at www.myspace.com/upshotenergy is interesting on two levels. First, they’ve very successfully adapted to the milieu of the myspace crowd through their extravagant and garish approach to graphic design. Just as importantly, however, they’ve also managed to create a personality for themselves. They unashamedly declare themselves to be a 25-year-old female living in Santa Cruz. Just the kind of person, I would hazard a guess, who typifies their key target audience.

This reminds me of the kinds of questions that get asked at focus groups. If this car were a celebrity, which celebrity would they be? If this celebrity were a car, what kind of car would they be? Brain teasers like this are beloved of agency planners and market researchers as they often reveal surprising things that will never come out in a straightforward discussion. Usually you find out quite unpleasant things that you’d rather not have heard. What Upshot are, in effect, saying is that brands can actually become people on the web. All they have to do is act like an individual rather than a product or a business.

We discover that Upshot would love to meet Mini-Me from Austin Powers and trade blows with martial arts legend Bruce Lee. Her star sign is Cancer and she describes herself as a swinger. All in all, she has a more rounded personality than many of her fellow myspace contributors and you can’t help feeling that it would be nice to meet up with her sometime real soon.

Hey, maybe next time I’m over in Monterey Bay? It would be like so cool to call Upshot up and head to The Wharf and like chill together.

© Phil Woodford, 2007. All rights reserved.

Phil Woodford lectures in advertising at the University of Westminster in London and teaches copywriting and creative writing at University of the Arts London. www.philwoodford.com

Manx marketing: Phil Woodford speaks at a meeting in Douglas, Isle of Man last month. The theme was the promotion of the island to investors.

How Sir Geoff Hurst scores for Germany in the world of location branding

David Ogilvy once observed that “people don’t go half way round the world to see things they can equally well see at home.” I was reminded of this pithy observation when I travelled to the Isle of Man last month on behalf of the Chartered Institute of Marketing. As well as spending an enjoyable couple of days at the International Business School in Douglas, running training sessions for local delegates, I had been invited to participate in an interesting meeting that focused on the question of promoting “Isle of Man plc” to potential investors.

Over the past quarter of a century, a thriving offshore finance market has developed locally which – together with the tourist industry – provides the employment bedrock for the Manx community. With an eye to the future, branding consultants and government officials have recently shot a video that demonstrates the island’s unique strengths, under the theme Freedom to Flourish. The approach is well researched and thought out and I wish them luck with it.

In preparing for the meeting, I spent some time looking at the whole business of location branding and some of the techniques that are used to encourage both tourism and inward investment. There’s no doubt that a place can become a brand in exactly the same way as a business, product or service. Its name and reputation can evoke a mood and contain a sense of promise. Australia, for instance, conjures up immediate images in my mind of open spaces, sunshine, a free-spirited population and a down-to-earth honesty. The kind of positives, in fact, that most global corporations would die for. The current “Where the bloody hell are you?” campaign doesn’t create these notions in our mind for the first time. It simply reinforces existing preconceptions and never finds itself having to work too hard.

Although it’s rather trickier to plot a creative route when your location lacks a distinct identity, the blank sheet of paper certainly has its attractions. It might be argued that if your target audience doesn’t really know who you are, you can become almost anything you want to be. Toby Chambers, Creative Director of the style magazine Wallpaper* was quoted recently in The Sunday Times as saying: “Cool destinations are those that people haven’t thought of yet. People are searching off-piste as other places become exhausted.” And there’s the added advantage that you usually do have something quite unique to distinguish you. Authors S D Jaworski and D Fosher argue that language, separation, diversity and experience combine to make something quite special¹. It’s not as if we’re distinguishing one model of PC from another, after all.

The reality though is perhaps a little more complex and restrictive. Cities, regions and nations are understandably sold largely on the basis of their geography, history and culture. And these are things that are actually fairly difficult to change. As Philip Kotler – a Professor at Kellogg Graduate School of Management in Chicago – has pointed out, you can’t easily swap beaches for mountains².

One thing, however, is beyond dispute. The battle to build brand awareness and attract visitors and investors is intensifying year on year. Huge sums of money are being spent. And some rather unusual creative approaches are being adopted. Prior to this year’s FIFA World Cup, for example, I was fortunate enough to win a competition sponsored by the German Tourist Board. One of my prizes was a football signed by Sir Geoff Hurst, the only player ever to have scored a hat trick in the final of the competition. Sir Geoff has played an important role in convincing the British to consider Germany as a tourist destination. The whole campaign – based around the idea of destroying stereotypes – has a quirky and perhaps rather brave flavour to it.

No matter how good the advertising and marketing campaigns, you should never discount the importance of individual ambassadors. Just as an employee may be the living embodiment of a corporate brand, the residents of the Isle of Man have their own part to play in promoting the Manx offer. On my short journey from Douglas back to the airport on the southern tip of the island, I encountered a lady taxi driver who engaged me in conversation. She was a university graduate and had spent time in the Republic of Ireland and also Switzerland, where she had managed a bookshop. She’d made a conscious decision to return to a place that she genuinely loved. And, believe me, there’s no better advertisement than that.

¹ National Brand Identity & Its Effect On Corporate Brands: The Nation Brand Effect (NBE) Jaworski, SP and Fosher D in Mulitnational Business Review, Fall 2003

² Mapping a country’s future by Randall Frost on www.brandchannel.com

© Phil Woodford, 2006. All rights reserved.

Phil Woodford is an associate lecturer at University of the Arts London and acts as a mentor to students on the New Creative Ventures course, jointly sponsored by the London Business School. www.philwoodford.com

Don't panic! Don't panic! Unless you're a creative who's run out of steam...

Leesten vay carefully, I shall say zees only wurnce: your World War II gags are becoming tired.

They do mention the war. And I don't think they get away with it.

The latest campaign from brewer Shepherd Neame for Spitfire Beer continues the well-worked Second World War theme. There is, however, now a topical twist. A relatively low-key sporting competition - which I believe the Americans describe as "The Soccer World Cup" - is about to get under way in Germany. To the creative teams on the Spitfire account, this is the equivalent of der Geburtstag and das Weinachten arriving at the same time.

At a purely technical level, the ads are of varying quality. They range from the subtle and moderately amusing ("Best of luck chaps - see you in Berlin) to the downright laboured ("England's reserve team", with a picture of Home Guard members on parade). I think, however, we've got past the point at which individual executions can redeem the overall campaign. There's a tiresome familiarity to it all now and a definite feeling that the creative factory is churning stuff out faster than a wartime parachute factory.

Is it all a bit of harmless fun? Up until now, the answer was probably yes. But context is everything. The British Advertising Standards Authority frequently rules, for instance, that a provocative or explicit ad is ok in certain media - such as men's magazines, for example - but cannot be used as a poster in Piccadilly Circus, for fear of upsetting passing infants, grannies and others of a nervous disposition. Here, we have ads that might be alright at another time, but look decidedly dodgy at a point when thousands of England fans are going to be descending on Munich and Berlin. Not all of these boys are known for their sophistication and sense of post-modern irony. And while I doubt that the Spitfire ads are going to provoke a re-run of D-Day on the terraces at Gelsenkirchen, they are not exactly the kind of thing designed to ensure cordial relations either.

I could write lots of pompous waffle about advertising creatives having a sense of social responsibility, but I'm not sure that it would cut too much ice with those who conceived the ads. So I'll just make this point to them: if you're going to stir things up in advance of the World Cup with references to World War II, you better make sure that your stuff is genuinely funny. And that you're not melting old saucepans to create your latest Spitfire gag.

© Phil Woodford, 2006. All rights reserved.

Phil Woodford is a freelance writer and trainer. He works as an associate lecturer at the University of the Arts London. www.philwoodford.com

More power to you: 4-wd dm letta from BT is lol

The first sentence in a sales letter is important. Especially when it’s the only one.

I’m launching a brand new course tomorrow at the London College of Communication that focuses on the mysterious world of direct mail. I cut my copywriting teeth creating direct-response ads and sales letters, so it’s a subject close to my heart. As a result, I’m always looking out for innovative new creative approaches and techniques. “Junk” mail is unlikely to go in the bin at home. The chances are that it will head to the filing cabinet or scanner.

I’m indebted to my former colleague Alice (who blogs amusingly here about her preparations for the London marathon) for a convention-defying letter that will be great fun to show in the class. It was sent out by BT in December to promote their text service that allows UK customers to send and receive SMS messages on their home phone.

What exactly made this letter different and worthy of comment? Well, direct marketing science tells us that long letters generally perform better than short ones. That’s why you see letters running to two, three and four pages in many commercial and charitable mailpacks. You need time to explain the central benefits of your product, outline your offer and overcome any potential objections. You’re not there in the room with the customer to answer questions, so everything they need to know should be written down in black and white.

But BT apparently didn’t agree. They decided that two pages would be too much. In fact, they decided that two sentences would be more than they needed. Their extraordinary letter had only one line after the salutation, which sat in acres of white space. It said simply R U OK? Some more white space followed and led to the sign-off from Jillian Lewis, the company’s Customer Services Director.

Now, admittedly they cheated just a little. There are a couple of short paragraphs in the place where textbooks would normally tell you to put a PS. The copy starts: “There are times when you just want to send a short message home rather than have a long drawn-out conversation. With BT Text you can now send and receive texts on your home phone.” The net result is that the sales letter reads more like a traditional press ad, with the truncated body copy acting as a headline. It’s very brave. And it works a treat.

I do, however, intend to teach my students some of the more traditional conventions of letter writing. After all, it’s good to know the rules before you choose to break them into very tiny pieces.

© Phil Woodford, 2006. All rights reserved.

Phil Woodford is a freelance writer and trainer. He works as an associate lecturer at the University of the Arts London. www.philwoodford.com

Why Bodyform's advertising strategy isn't working.

I obviously wasn’t the only person to notice this poster opposite Kingston train station in the suburbs of London. It’s a bizarre execution for Bodyform, which parodies a Conservative Party election poster from 1979.

Think about it for a moment. The 2006 ad is pretty lame if you don’t have a fix on the original reference. (To be honest, it’s pretty lame even if you do, but we won’t go there for the moment.) The Tory ad commented – somewhat ironically, given later events – on the supposedly high levels of unemployment under Jim Callaghan’s administration. So the only people likely to remember it will be in their late 30s at the very least. Probably more likely to be in their early 40s. Visit the Bodyform website and you’ll discover that – logically enough – the primary target audience is actually young women.

I daren’t ask the age of the creatives at BBH who came up with the campaign, because I’ll probably be told it was a couple of 21-year-old female placement students. They just happen to have a passion for British political history. And a habit of missing the target.

© Phil Woodford, 2006. All rights reserved.

Phil Woodford is a freelance copywriter and trainer. He lectures in advertising at the University of Westminster in London. www.philwoodford.com

The hired gun can't fire blanks

Once in a while, I’m going to use these pages for a little reflection on the whole process of creativity. Perhaps it’s a little self-indulgent, but the more that I teach copywriting and creative writing, the more I find myself pondering some of the fundamentals. My recent move into self-employment has focused my mind even more.

Although I’ve undertaken a range of freelance writing and training assignments in the past few years, there’s always been a day job – most recently as joint creative director of a London agency in the niche field of recruitment marketing and employee communication. Working in the agency environment four days a week, I got very used to the personalities and processes. Although the pressure of work can sometimes feel relentless in the advertising business, I was very fortunate to have a great many good colleagues that I knew and trusted. It felt comfortable. They knew how I was likely to behave and I had a pretty good idea of what they were thinking too. Sometimes, when you were brainstorming creative concepts, the old truism of being able to complete one another’s sentences really did apply. And there are undoubtedly big advantages to these kinds of relationships. People aren’t afraid to express their ideas, for instance. It’s also easier to pick up other people’s work when a job goes round the houses.

But advertising creativity is an oddity. It’s one of the few areas of working life where two people – usually an art director and a copywriter – are asked to work as a pair. Often it’s done on an ad hoc, mix-and-match basis. Sometimes, particularly in the larger consumer agencies, the relationship is permanent. It’s difficult to think of many parallels, apart from maybe American cops like Cagney & Lacey or Starsky & Hutch. These paired relationships can have their downside as well. You can get to know the people you work with too well. Sometimes this means that you don’t challenge yourself or your partner quite enough.

It can often be good to encounter somebody new who works in a completely different way. They can pose unusual questions and uncover unlikely angles. It’s a phenomenon I encountered at the start of the year when I walked into an agency as a hired gun. I’d never been there before and was teamed up an art director I’d only met previously on an awards judging panel. This guy is very good. But I’ve worked with a number of good people over the years. The thing that really forced me to raise my game was the fact that we’d never worked together before. He was seeing what I could do. In the nicest possible way, testing me out a little. Inevitably, I was doing the same. And the net result, I think, was some really nice conceptual advertising. As a freelancer, I can’t afford to fail, so my grey matter is getting an extra special workout right now.

My advice, for what it’s worth, to any aspiring copywriter or art director is to work with as many different people as you can. A little cosiness can help you magic up some really good creative work. But a little edginess is perhaps more likely to produce something great.

© Phil Woodford, 2006. All rights reserved.

Phil Woodford is a freelance writer and trainer. He lectures in advertising at the University of Westminster in London.